Opinions of a Professional Reader

This is a sequel to King’s first detective novel in the classic style, Mr. Mercedes, and it’s not only set in the same anonymous Midwestern city, its events begin with the same 2009 massacre-by-automobile at the job fair. This time, the victim on whom we focus is Tom Saubers, a husband and father who was laid off and is becoming desperate to find work. He survives being run over by the Mercedes but it takes several years for his injuries to heal, and the stress of all this nearly causes him and his wife to divorce. But his young son, Pete, has found a way to ease the family’s money woes.

I’ve been aware of Morton as an author of well-received romantic novels, but those usually aren’t my thing, so I hadn’t actually read any of her books — until this one, which was recommended by several friends who knew my tastes. And it is, in fact, very, very good indeed. In fact, it’s an amazing piece of work.

Cornwell has been following known history pretty closely in his excellent series about the gradual making of England in the 8th century, but there are lots of natural gaps and lulls in that history, so this ninth installment is almost entirely fictional for a change.

This is the second novel about Aud Torvingen, six-foot-tall Atlanta ex-cop, private investigator, self-defense and martial arts expert, new multimillionaire by inheritance, Lesbian, and experienced killer (“violence is a tool like any other”), whom we first met in The Blue Place. And it’s a doozie.

This is the second in the author’s “Very English Mystery” series, set in the early 1950s in Britain and featuring semi-retired Secret Service agent Hugo Hawksworth, his adolescent sister, and Frey Wryton, all of them residents of Selchester Castle, a huge old place with a medieval core, but still in very good condition.

The third book of this excellent time-travel trilogy — which turned out not be the last in what became a series, though it certainly felt like it at the time — puts Alex Balfour in the thick of World War II in the Pacific, beginning with Pearl Harbor and ending with ground zero at Hiroshima.

The Elvis Cole/Joe Pike private eye novels have been called “smart guy noir” and that’s certainly the case in this second installment in the series. Elvis is definitely an oddball, with an office that sports a Mickey Mouse phone, a Pinocchio wall clock (the eyes move; “You go to the Pinkertons, they don’t have a clock like that”), a figurine of Jiminy Cricket, and a Spiderman coffee mug.

It’s always nice to discover a new mystery author and a new set of interesting characters living in a new setting. Edmondson has produced eight previous novels but this appears to be her first sort-of detective story, set in the early days of the Cold War.

So it’s 1953 in darkest England and Hugo Hawksworth is reporting for duty to the secret government department for which he works in a small town four hours from London.

This is the first of the long-running Elvis Cole/Joe Pike detective stories and it’s a good starting place, too. Cole is a thirty-five-year-old Vietnam vet with a strong background in martial arts, a quirky personality, a taste for kitsch, and a sometimes peculiar sense of humor. He’s been a PI for eight years in partnership with Joe Pike, a highly laconic and extremely dangerous mercenary soldier.

King has written a huge number of novels over the years, and while many of them are first-rate writing, most of them also are simply not to my taste. I don’t do horror, really, or stories about the supernatural. But this one is a considerable departure in that regard — except for the horror that people in the real world visit upon one other.

Where Does This Stuff Come From?

As a retired public librarian (large system in a large Southern city), I've been writing book reviews for the consumption of others for 50 years now. Starting in 1999, I began posting my reviews to a personal website, but in 2009, I discovered Wordpress & shifted my reviewing jones to a blog.

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What Do I Read?

What do you have? My tastes in reading are extremely eclectic and I seldom follow a plan. My "to read" list is lengthy and always growing; it presently runs to 50+ pages. Sometimes I'll pick up a book on the strength of a favorable review. Sometimes I simply browse the "New Books" section at the library. Sometimes I discover a series of novels and read the whole sequence, one volume after another. I read a great deal of science fiction, cookbooks, mysteries, archaeology, Dickens, art books, historical novels, architecture, children's as well as YA books, language and grammar, chick-lit, Civil War history, graphic novels, Terry Pratchett, experimental literature, travel books, books about books and reading -- almost anything you can think of (with the exceptions of sports books and western novels, which simply bore me).

A Note about Reviews from the More Distant Past

Since books never go out of date, all the pages below are quarterly cumulations of my past book reviews (with the number of reviews on each page indicated). You can browse or you can find specific authors or titles (or any other word or phrase) through the search box above. (Categories and tags, unfortunately, cannot be attached to pages.)